Levi R. Bryant: Denaturing Nature

SPACE

05 Jul 2012

A lecture by Levi R. Bryant, a leading thinker in the emerging fields of Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism. Doors 6:30 / Talk 7pm.

Abstract: 

Nature must be denatured, but without abandoning nature. Rather than absorbing nature into culture and language, culture should instead be absorbed into nature in such a way as to show that there's only nature.

This talk proposes a post-Galilean/Post-Darwinian conception of nature in which nature is understood as all that exists, including the cultural and social, and where nature is contingent, historical, and creative. This account of nature is contrasted with the pre-Modern and Modern concept of nature, where nature is treated as something that is outside of culture and where it is rhetorically and ideologically used as a tool to legitimize various forms of oppression and prevent emancipatory projects. The post-Galilean/post-Darwinian account of nature undermines such ideological gestures and defends an account of nature where societies are themselves understood as ecologies dependent upon a broader natural world and where social identities are natural constructions or inventions with a reality of their own.

Denaturing Nature on Levi R. Bryant's blog Larval Subjects

Levi R. Bryant’s thoughts on a wide variety of subjects including ontology, ecology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and politics appear regularly on his blog Larval Subjects (http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/). He is also the author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, The Democracy of Objects and co-editor of The Speculative Turn, with Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. A former Lacanian psychoanalyst, Bryant is now Professor of Philosophy at Collin College, Texas.

This event is organised in collaboration with Rory Rowan. Rowan recently completed his PhD at the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, where he worked on the concept of space in the thought of Carl Schmitt. His writings on art, geophilosophy and politics have appeared in a number of online and print publications.